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A homograph (from the Greek: ὁμός, homós 'same' and γράφω, gráphō 'write') is a word that shares the same written form as another word but has a different meaning. [1] However, some dictionaries insist that the words must also be pronounced differently, [ 2 ] while the Oxford English Dictionary says that the words should also be of ...
A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. [2] For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are synonymous. The standard test for synonymy is substitution: one form can be ...
Metonymy and related figures of speech are common in everyday speech and writing. Synecdoche and metalepsis are considered specific types of metonymy. Polysemy, the capacity for a word or phrase to have multiple meanings, sometimes results from relations of metonymy. Both metonymy and metaphor involve the substitution of one term for another. [6]
A thesaurus (pl.: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms.
Semantics is the study of meaning in languages. [1] It is a systematic inquiry that examines what linguistic meaning is and how it arises. [2] It investigates how expressions are built up from different layers of constituents, like morphemes, words, clauses, sentences, and texts, and how the meanings of the constituents affect one another. [3]
Words such as mouth, meaning either the orifice on one's face, or the opening of a cave or river, are polysemous and may or may not be considered homonyms. Capitonyms are words that share the same spelling but have different meanings when capitalized (and may or may not have different pronunciations).
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One of the predominant questions concerning children and language acquisition deals with the relation between the perception and the production of a child's word usage. It is difficult to understand what a child understands about the words that they are using and what the desired outcome or goal of the utterance should be.